With short sales, gird for long haul

Special report

But for pretty much everyone involved, it's not a way to buy a house quickly.

Short sales are anything but short. Buyers and sellers often get so fed up with the protracted process that it's not unusual for the deals to simply die.

"If I had an option, I would never do a short sale," said real-estate agent Maria Van Warner of Fannie Hillman and Associates.

Short sales -- when houses sell for less than the mortgages owed on them -- and foreclosures now account for more than half of the home sales in the Orlando area, according to the Orlando Regional Realtor Association.

In the spectrum of home sales, the deals fall somewhere between a regular transaction and a foreclosure. Sellers faced with foreclosure may opt for a short sale because it does not mar their credit as much as if the bank took over the house. They typically contact a real-estate agent and set a sales price, based on an appraisal. Once the property sells, the bank must approve the sales price.

Getting banks to approve a sale for less than the mortgage amount is what takes time. The process can become so complicated, with different lenders setting different rules, that short sales take about a month longer than other home sales to complete, according to the association.

Once a buyer signs a contract, foreclosure sales take five weeks to complete, traditional home sales take seven weeks and short sales take more than 10 weeks.

And the time it takes to complete a short sale has only grown longer as the year has progressed, with the bank-approved transactions taking seven weeks in January.

Van Warner, the Winter Park real-estate agent, said she has buyers who have the moving van coming next week to transport their belongings from Grand Rapids, Mich., to Orlando, but the truck probably won't head to the Winter Park house the couple had contracted to buy.

Instead of hanging their clothes in the Windsong home they had agreed to purchase, the would-be buyers likely will check into a hotel suite because of short-sale complications, she said.

'Very disrespectful'

For sellers, the process can be a tortured farewell to a home that has lost its value.

Winter Springs resident Wanda Gibbons said the 4,000-square-foot home she purchased at the peak of the market in July 2007 for more than $510,000 was just days from "going to the courthouse steps" to be sold at auction when she contacted Longwood attorney Justin Clark to explore a short-sale option. That was in May.

She hired a real-estate agent and got an appraisal that showed her five-bedroom pool home with the brick pavers was worth about half what she paid two years earlier.

"When I saw that appraisal, I thought: This was very disrespectful," said Gibbons, who still owed about $459,000 on the house. "The home is in a neighborhood where houses next door were selling for $400K. It was an injustice."

A buyer quickly jumped on the $205,000 sales price but could not get a federally backed loan approved. Fortunately, Gibbons said, other buyers were waiting and signed a contract.

Short sales usually get offers within a few weeks, often from investors interested in the low prices, said Clark, who has worked on hundreds of the transactions in the past few years.

Once Gibbons had a contract on her house, Clark submitted to her lender a package that included everything from the appraisal and a hardship letter to a sales contract. And then the waiting began.

"The problem is, it depends on the bank, the people the bank has and how many mortgages they have," the attorney said. "These banks, they're so inundated."

Banks typically take 45 to 60 days to even acknowledge they got the paperwork and to assign a negotiator to work on the sale, Clark said. At that point, they get a broker's price opinion on the value of the home and whether the sales price makes sense.

If the sales price doesn't measure up to the broker's opinion, the lender may tell the seller that price should be higher. In some cases, Clark said, the buyer will agree to pay more, the seller may have to throw in a few thousand dollars or the real-estate agent may agree to cut his commission.

'It's been so long'

In Gibbons' case, the process was somewhat easier because -- unlike many short sellers -- she had no second mortgage. Some lenders refuse to share any of the sales proceeds with the bank that holds the second mortgage. In some cases, homeowners face getting their credit rating dinged for not paying the second mortgage. That becomes part of the negotiation, Clark added.

At that point, the deals can fall apart.

"It's been so long," Clark said. "If it's an investor buying, they'll buy it anyway. . . . If it's a real buyer, you may lose them because they need a home to live in."

Gibbons said she was responsible for some delays with the sale, dealing with a medical issue and the trauma of losing the house. The sale, which closed in September, took about five months and was frustrating at times, she said. But, she added, it was worth it.

"Looking back, I would say it was a great decision because it would take 20 years, or probably never, to make up the lost value," she said. "It was a house on sinking sand, but I walked away not owing anything on the house."